Wednesday, August 9, 2017

How the internet is shaping our collective memory – for better or for worse

The internet has brought change to almost everything in our lives. In particular, the ways we acquire knowledge have significantly changed, partly due to online knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia. In fact, it has even changed the way science is being done. Social scientists increasingly are using online data to study our individual or collective behaviour on a scale and with an accuracy normally only seen in the natural sciences. Sure, we are still far from having large experimental social science data sets similar to the ones produced in CERN, but at least we have digital observational data like that…